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F-Spot and photo metadata
F-Spot users may want to have a look at this
strongly-worded post from Daniel Bartholomew; it seems that F-Spot has
a habit of silently changing timestamps in EXIF metadata. "As can be
seen, F-Spot has decided that the users are idiots and to update the fields
with the values it thinks are best without telling anyone. It decided to
set the DateTime field to the time when the photo was imported into F-Spot
(as if that date is so important it needs to be saved for posterity). For
DateTimeOriginal F-Spot decided that the appropriate time is the UTC time
when the picture was taken (conveniently deciding that since my computer is
currently in U.S Eastern Daylight Time, I must have been in the same
timezone when I took the picture and that my camera was set to the correct
time for my timezone at the time I took the picture)." The problem
has been in F-Spot's bug tracker for some three years now.
(Log in to post comments)
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 14:59 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
Fully agree -- the rest of f-spot isn't bad tool but the way it messes up picture times is just so fucked up. And evidently the developers don't care or think it's a feature.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:11 UTC (Fri) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]
I believe those using F-Spot despite its Mono dependency like adventurous experiences, or are ingenuous.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:45 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Actually, the dependency on Mono can reduce both the number of developers and the number of users motivated to report bugs. I hope F-Spot will be rewritten in C++ just like Tomboy was rewritten as Gnote. That won't fix the bugs, of course, but in the long term it could keep the project in a better shape.
irelevant side issue Posted Oct 30, 2009 16:43 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Whether or not the program should alter metadata is completely orthogonal to whether C# or C++ is a better language to write programs in.
irelevant side issue Posted Oct 30, 2009 17:35 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
From a purely technical point of view you are right. But I can see how some people come to collapse all this into only one "bad attitude" problem.
irelevant side issue Posted Oct 30, 2009 17:47 UTC (Fri) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
Well, presumably the choice of language and the choice of whether to silently mess up exif or not were all made by the same person or group of people, so the former and the latter could be correlated (e.g. those who choose mono also do other bad choices, like silently messing up exifs). This is tongue-in-cheek, but only partly -- I think there is some truth in this, too.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:27 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
Am I right that if I tested F-Spot by importing the photos but not copying them to a new folder (which is a stupid default IMHO for importing existing HDD folders), the EXIF data wasn't modified? At least it seems so, photos that definitely were imported when I tested seem to have their EXIF data intact.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 31, 2009 8:49 UTC (Sat) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link]
No, f-spot has mangled the dates on photos that I simply added to its database and didn't copy to any central f-spot store.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Nov 7, 2009 18:10 UTC (Sat) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]
I don't think it has a way to tell if a directory is local or a mounted external device. I think it defaults to copying (but of course with an option not to) because it expects users like me: we plug in our cameras or memory cards, and tell it to yank everything from the camera and tag it for us.
I think it used show the import date in the timeline instead of the date the photo was taken. That it at least now goes by EXIF instead of import date is an improvement. But um...agreed with the original: ew to mangling metadata.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:38 UTC (Fri) by joey (subscriber, #328) [Link]
Makes me glad I keep my raw photos in git. I ran f-spot for the first time
a while ago, noticed it changed *every* photo, and made a puzzled commit of the changes. Off to revert that commit now.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 16:00 UTC (Fri) by engla (guest, #47454) [Link] Git has an example in git help attributes how you could catch this:For example, to show the diff of the exif information of a file
instead of the binary information (assuming you have the exif
tool installed):
[diff "jpg"]
textconv = exif
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 17:49 UTC (Fri) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
Wow! That's a gem, thanks!
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 15:49 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I'm surprised that anybody actually uses or cares about F-Spot. It's the slowest photo management app I've ever seen, taking the better part of a second to switch photos. I've used web apps that are faster! It is also prone to stupid database corruption issues.
Photo management is one area where Linux desperately needs to improve.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 16:08 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Have you tried Digikam? I use the KDE 3.x release of that software and although some things are a bit "clunky" (the download tool is usable but seems somewhat cluttered if you explore it - I don't bother, myself; the gphoto back-end seems to get upset with cameras being given different memory cards; I end up using Gwenview - another nice tool - to view pictures at 100%, rather than the built-in viewer), it's a convenient way of managing reasonably large volumes of photographs.
Changing users' EXIF data without telling them is dirty, without a doubt. I've used Digikam's tools to do time-shifting on pictures, but that's an explicit procedure activated by the user, not the "GNOME knows best" kind of antics which also brought us the reversed "Cancel" and "OK" button layout and "spatial browsing" as if it were an innovation (and not a trip in time to the more inconvenient regions of the RISC OS desktop).
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 31, 2009 11:37 UTC (Sat) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]
Here's another vote for Digikam - it's pretty nice and development seem to progress rapidly.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 31, 2009 17:47 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
For simple viewing, gwenview is very nice.
Derek
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Nov 4, 2009 12:37 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I like Gwenview. Maybe it should be more closely integrated into Digikam, thus saving me from having to choose it from the menu. :-)
As for the remark "photo management is one area where Linux desperately needs to improve", I've seen the Windows-only camera manufacturer applications and they're mostly awful: Fujifilm's FinePix picture manager has the usual awkward Windows application interface style with a crude pop-up picture viewer; Canon's picture manager seems also to belong in the weird user interface behaviour category. If one made applications like that for other platforms, people would moan about how only Windows provides a consistent experience, but it seems to me that every other application on Windows uses its own bizarre theme, as if everyone were trying to out-do Winamp.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 31, 2009 5:37 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
Fully agreed. F-Spot is an insult in the form of an application. The
amazing thing is that Ubuntu insists on trying to make me mangle my photos with it, every time I mount a CF card.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 16:24 UTC (Fri) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]
> "...decided that the users are idiots..."
Hmm I know another very widely used software vendor does that... can't remember who... I wonder if they have any connection with F-Spot, even if somewhat indirect...
:-)
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 18:16 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
A very dubious "feature" indeed. Some open source software is very much developed cathedral-style and it takes a special ivory tower not to correct decisions such as these.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 18:18 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]
So, that guy likes F-Spot too much to refuse switching to another photo manager, but instead of crediting the developers he decides to write a blog about them being dicks for not fixing his pet bug?
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Oct 30, 2009 21:32 UTC (Fri) by cmsj (guest, #55014) [Link]
and then LWN grabs some eyeballs with the catchy headline!
Still, everyone got to be indignant for a while and nobody had to do any
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Nov 1, 2009 7:55 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
It's a ridiculous bug - it's very clear what to fix, it's just that the developer for some reason thinks it's OK to obliterate timestamp data when viewing a file. What if less or cat did the same thing?
Extreme use-cases Posted Nov 4, 2009 12:58 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
The discussion on the bug is amusing at some points:
"For example, if a user takes a picture in New York City, then quickly flies to Los Angeles, he would still want to see his New York pictures before his Los Angeles pictures, even though the local time of the Los Angeles picture would be earlier than the local time of the New York pictures."
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340903#c5
As far as I know, Concorde (when it was still in service) wasn't allowed to fly at supersonic speeds over the continental United States.
Of course, there are more persuasive use-cases than the above, but really the rule is this: if you can't figure out a way of processing your source data that always does the right thing, don't process the data! (And don't change the source files - that's what the image database is for.) Especially when the only use-cases on hand to justify the broken behaviour feature retired forms of air transportation.
F-Spot and photo metadata Posted Nov 2, 2009 14:11 UTC (Mon) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
The problem, the way I see it, is that once I *try* F-spot *once* my photos metadata will get royally screwed.
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